About

My name is Michael Johnson, and I’m a PhD candidate at McMaster University’s Department of Religious Studies. I specialize in the area of early Judaism and the literature of the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE).

I am working on a dissertation that is re-examining the categories used to describe the kinds of psalms in 1QHodayota, a manuscript containing the Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot)—a collection of early Jewish poetry that was found in eight copies among the Dead Sea scrolls.

I also am interested in digital scholarship and the digital humanities. I’m currently a graduate resident at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University, where I work on digital approaches to addressing research questions about Dead Sea Scrolls.